With bats in the attic, skunks and marmots under the
floor, deer mice in the corners and cluster flies throughout the
house, Kathleen Meyer may want to sleep on the deck, but at least
she no longer has to shit in the woods.
In
Barefoot Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife, Meyer, author of the
trail sanitation classic, How to Shit in the Woods, describes her
life roughing it in Montana’s Bitterroot
Valley.
She and her partner, farrier Patrick
McCarron, bunk down in a dairy barn they claim as home, enjoying
the night sounds. But when bats, skunks and flies come knocking,
they don’t go for their guns or call the exterminator. Meyer,
instead, does research to understand her house guests, deciding
that it might make more sense to just accommodate
them.
This is a book as much about Meyer’s
relationship with McCarron as it is a tale of a city girl coming to
terms with country life. Meyer was born in New York and raised in
New Jersey and California, but came to know the West better than
most – at one point, she and Patrick traveled by covered wagon
through Wyoming, Montana and Colorado.
Meyer and
McCarron settled 10 years ago in the Bitterroot Valley, where they
watched their two-lane valley morph, like so many others, into a
five-lane highway. As in her first unlikely best seller, Meyer
handles her own story with a sharp wit and a clean style.
Barefoot Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife. By
Kathleen Meyer. Villard Books, Random House Inc. New York,
Hardcover: $24.95. 313 pages.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline No shoes, no problem.
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